A matron who allegedly molested Princess Diana‘s brother at boarding school went on to become an NHS nurse looking after patients with severe mental illness, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
In his powerful memoir, Earl Spencer candidly told how a predatory assistant matron he branded a ‘voracious paedophile’ groomed him and other young boys at Maidwell Hall preparatory school in Northamptonshire.
Today, after a three-month investigation, this newspaper can reveal the identity of the woman who allegedly sexually abused him when he was just 11 in the 1970s and how she later spent years working with vulnerable patients.
Grandmother Sally Jane Carr, 67, was twice married and, after working at Charles Spencer‘s school, retrained in the 1980s as a mental health nurse.
She was a manager at a charity that helps alcohol, drug and gambling addicts and spent at least five years with the NHS, specialising in helping mental health patients who have a history of criminal offending.
Her now deleted online CV described her as an ‘experienced mental health practitioner…skilled in clinical supervision’.
Grandmother Sally Jane Carr (pictured), 67, was twice married and, after working at Charles Spencer’s school, retrained in the 1980s as a mental health nurse
In his powerful memoir, Earl Spencer (pictured as a child) candidly told how a predatory assistant matron he branded a ‘voracious paedophile’ groomed him
Earl Spencer, who attended Maidwell between the ages of eight and 13, described how the matron, who he did not name in the book, first ‘kissed me on the lips’
After retiring from the NHS in 2019 she now lives in a three-bedroom terrace home in the West Midlands.
When approached by The Mail on Sunday, Earl Spencer confirmed that Sally Carr was the woman in his book. He said: ‘Yes, Sally Carr is the woman who sexually abused me at school when I was 11.’
His comments came as a second former Maidwell Hall pupil named Carr as the predatory matron, and alleged that she took his virginity when he was aged 12 in a school dormitory.
A lawyer for Carr said she ‘vehemently denies all allegations of any abuse being carried out by her to the Earl and any other individual whatsoever’.
Carr ‘cannot possibly be the individual referenced by the Earl’ in his memoir, the lawyer added.
In a devastating extract from his memoir, exclusively published by The Mail on Sunday in March, Charles Spencer, 60, described how the matron, who he said was 19 or 20 at the time, groomed and then abused boys in their dormitory beds at night.
Earl Spencer, who attended Maidwell between the ages of eight and 13, described how the matron, who he did not name in the book, first ‘kissed me on the lips’ before she ‘promoted me to the second rank of her reverse harem: those she intimately touched’.
The abuse, and the emotional confusion it caused, led to him self-harming and wanting ‘full sex from a too-early age’. He lost his virginity aged 12 to a prostitute in Italy. The peer also detailed horrific beatings he suffered from male teachers at the school and the lifelong damage they caused.
Boarding school Maidwell Hall, where Early Spencer revealed he was abused in the 1970s
When approached by The Mail on Sunday, Earl Spencer confirmed that Sally Carr was the woman in his book
In a devastating extract from his memoir Charles Spencer, 60, described how the matron, who he said was 19 or 20 at the time, groomed and then abused boys
The shocking revelations in his book, A Very Private School, which topped the Sunday Times bestseller chart, made headlines around the world.
Speaking about the assistant matron at the Hay literature festival last weekend, the Earl said: ‘I’m sure justice may well catch up with her quite soon.’
Two days later the MoS spoke to another former Maidwell Hall pupil who alleged that he too was sexually abused by the assistant matron – and who named his abuser as Sally Carr.
The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, alleged that Carr took his virginity when he was 12 and said: ‘I have remembered her name for many years.’ He described how she would intimately touch some boys and creep into the beds of others, after lights out, and have sex.
‘She used to sleep with some boys and then she did, I guess, sexual favours to others,’ he said. ‘… some nights she would come into your bedroom when lights were out and then with some – I don’t know whether it was all of us, but I’m assuming not many of us – she would sleep with. Not the whole night – you’d have sex, basically.’
The quietly-spoken businessman, who talked to the MoS at his home in the Midlands, told his wife and friends of the abuse some years ago. He had previously made light of what happened but since the publication of Earl Spencer’s harrowing account he views the episode differently and says what the matron did was ‘clearly wrong’.
He also now questions whether the molestation has affected him more than he initially thought.
In his memoir, Earl Spencer revealed that he had established that the matron married at least twice, the first time a year or so after leaving Maidwell. He was, however, unable to find her and said he suspected that she had either moved abroad or was dead.
Excerpts from Charles Spencer’s new memoir were published exclusively by the Mail
Charles Spencer with sister Diana and nanny Mary Clarke on the day he leaves for Maidwell Hall in 1972
But the MoS was able to establish that she is leading a quiet life of relative obscurity in a West Midlands market town. The first clue to the true identity of the matron came when we discovered that a woman named Sally J Carr was registered on the electoral roll as living at Maidwell in October 1975.
By searching publicly available birth records, we learnt that she turned 19 in December 1975 – the approximate age of the young woman the Earl said abused him. Carr is believed to have worked at Maidwell Hall during the autumn term of 1975 and the spring term of 1976.
Records show she married in 1977, with her marriage certificate detailing her occupation as ‘assistant matron’. She divorced in 1987 and – just as Earl Spencer outlined – married for a second time in 1989.
In a distressing part of his memoir, Earl Spencer details how, amid the emotional turmoil caused by the abuse, he self-harmed when the matron suggested she might leave the school for a job in the Royal Navy. ‘I was so fraught at the prospect of losing her that I started cutting at the inside of my arm with a penknife,’ he wrote.
Astonishingly, Carr’s first marriage certificate, obtained by the MoS, details how her Scottish-born husband was a radio operator in the Royal Navy.
This was not the only clue to Carr’s allegedly dark past. Earl Spencer wrote that the matron had a middle-aged child and that he had spotted online that she attended her father’s funeral some years back.
We established that Sally Carr has one child: a 41-year-old managing director of a property investment firm.
Meanwhile, her father David Carr died in 2011 aged 87. An obituary published by The Times newspaper and reproduced online by website Legacy.com describes him as a ‘loving father of Sally’ and ‘devoted grandpa’.
Earl Spencer claimed in his book that ‘when still extremely young’ the matron abused another boy ‘at another boarding school’ before she started working at Maidwell.
‘I met a boy from that other place who indicated that she’d subjected him to the same inappropriate and baffling experiences, and he was still in touch with her,’ he wrote. It is unclear where this alleged abuse took place but the MoS has established that Sally Carr’s father was the headteacher of Yarlet Hall, a boarding school in Staffordshire, between 1970 and 1989.
The MoS understands that a group of Maidwell Hall pupils went to Yarlet Hall in 1975 to watch a production by boys from that school of the musical Oliver! Sally Carr accompanied the Maidwell boys on the trip, one source claimed.
Documents reveal that she and her first husband married in the Yarlet Hall chapel in April 1977 and Carr declared the school as her ‘residence’ on the marriage certificate.
In a distressing part of his memoir, Earl Spencer details how, amid the emotional turmoil caused by the abuse, he self-harmed
Earl Spencer claimed in his book that ‘when still extremely young’ the matron abused another boy ‘at another boarding school’ before she started working at Maidwell
In an extraordinary echo of the physical abuse suffered by Earl Spencer at Maidwell Hall, at least one former pupil at Yarlet has accused her father David Carr, a keen cricketer whose brother Donald played for England and captained Derbyshire, of brutal beatings.
Describing the alleged abuse online, an ex-pupil wrote: ‘The man who set the tone in my experience was David Carr. Others who perhaps won his approval by excelling at sports saw a different man, but to me he was twisted and sick.
‘I was never aware that he was explicitly sexually abusive (though what is making children bare their bottoms and bend over to be beaten with a gym shoe, I wonder, if not sexualised violence?) but there was something I experienced as sadistic and insidious about the way he used his undoubted intelligence to control and terrify.
‘Does anyone else remember how he came round the dorms in the middle of the night, with his huge headlamp of a torch, woke the current victims or suspects, and took them back to his study one at a time for interrogations or beatings?’
It is believed Carr served in the Women’s Royal Navy Service (Wrens) in the late 1970s before returning to civilian life. An online CV reveals she qualified as a mental health nurse after studying at the Staffordshire school of nursing between 1980 and 1983. She also appears to have studied counselling at Birmingham University between 1986 and 1988.
The CV is thought to have come from a LinkedIn profile, which was deleted after the publication of Earl Spencer’s memoir. It shows that Carr worked as a manager at a Birmingham-based charity called Aquarius in the 1980s, offering drug, alcohol and gambling support services.
During this period her marriage to her first husband, who became a prison officer, broke down. They divorced in 1987 and Carr remarried in Fort William, Scotland, two years later.
She went on to achieve a post-graduate certificate in counselling at Keele University in 2012 and became a so-called specialist practitioner in ‘forensic psychology’ at South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
The NHS careers website says forensic psychologists ‘offer treatment for those who have committed offences to reduce the impact of their experiences and to reduce chances of reoffending’.
‘You’ll work in the treatment of offenders in a range of areas including sexual offending, violence and aggression, interpersonal and social skills and intervention to help stop illicit drug and or alcohol use,’ it adds.
A picture on Twitter in 2014 shows her with colleagues from a consultancy created by the NHS in 2007 to support mental health patients. She co-authored a report by the consultancy in 2014 about how to help mental health patients in secure units with a history of offending.
She also ran a ‘staff development’ workshop at a forensic mental health services event held at the Royal College of Psychiatrists headquarters in London in February 2017.
Speaking at his five-bedroom detached home, Sally Carr’s son said: ‘She won’t want to speak to the Press. I’ll say it very clearly: there’s no interest in speaking to the Press from me, from anybody else.’
Reflecting on his experience at Maidwell Hall last weekend, Earl Spencer, who has seven children from three marriages, said: ‘You have to keep an eye on children. I’ve got children of all ages but they all got very bored by their father cross-questioning them… whether any teachers made them uncomfortable.’
The lawyer for Carr said there were ‘very clear factual discrepancies’ which ‘unequivocally confirm that our client is not the perpetrator of the alleged abuse against Earl Spencer’.